Case

You have a WAR to deploy on Tomcat, let’s say jonathan.war for instance. Usually, the application will be reached through the URL http://machine:port/jonathan.
Let’s say you would like to exclude the WAR name from the address, ie the application to be reached on http://machine:port/. This operation is called “to deploy in root”, since the context will be simple slash: '/'.

Case

I had the following issue: when I undeployed the WAR from Tomcat using the manager instance, the undeploy failed. As a workaround, I had to restart Tomcat for the undeploy to be taken in account.
This issue occured only in Windows ; when the exact same WAR and the same version of Tomcar on Debian, I was able to deploy and undeploy many times.

Abstract

You would like to work on the client side of your GWT application, without building and deploying the Jetty server. Or, in the same way, you need test some server features available in WebLogic but not in Jetty, such as the EJB.GWT 2.0 documentation, at the segment How do I use my own server in hosted mode instead of GWT’s built-in Jetty instance? is not precise at all on the 3rd step: it simply states:

“change the URL at the end of the argument list to match the URL you recorded in step #1.”

Process

Let’s assume your WAR is deployed on http://distantMachine:8080/myApplication. The servlet container may be Tomcat or WebLogic, it does not matter